ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will be examining morphological change, changes in the morphological structure of lexical items and of inflected forms, and changes in morphological systems. Morphological change has been extensively studied, and we now know a good deal about how it occurs. Drawing sharp lines between the various types of possible morphological change is not straightforward, however, since many individual changes exhibit features of two or three of the different types we would like to recognize; nor is it always easy to separate morphological change from syntactic change, the topic of the next chapter. Nevertheless, the central ideas in the study of morphological change are generally easy to understand.
